The Book of Unconformities

How do you describe a book as singular as this one? Writing in the wake of family tragedy—the sudden deaths of two sisters—Raffles, a British anthropologist living in New York City, is drawn to the solidity and stability of geology and geologic time. But even there he finds fissures and discontinuities, visiting a series of evocative locations from upper Manhattan to the remote Arctic and tracing the ways human history has, often tragically, built itself around the more patient, but still moving, history of stones. If you love the way writers like W.G. Sebald and Robert Macfarlane connect the personal to the strange vastness of our world, you will gladly follow Raffles on his journeys (which, unlike Sebald's, are thoroughly footnoted).